Presidential Debate Is a Feast for the Punditry

DENVER — Anyone who tuned into news coverage of the presidential debate probably woke up on Thursday morning with their ears still ringing with pundits’ declarations that the course of the presidential campaign had shifted dramatically.

And The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has published scorching critiques of Mitt Romney, conferred its blessing: Best Republican performance in a debate since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan asked Americans if they were better off than they were four years ago.

Hyperbole has always greased the gears of the political commentary machine. Yet with liberals and conservatives as far apart as ever on even the most basic facts of the presidential campaign — like what the polls are really saying — the political news cycle is being driven by a fixation on any sign of distress in either campaign. Until Wednesday night, that focus had been on the Romney campaign.

And with political drama experiencing its own booming economy — in books, films and HBO movies — there is no shortage of incentives to emphasize the conflict and controversy over the substance.

Mr. Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, his “Morning Joe” co-host, were shopping around a movie script this year. Two of their regular guests in delivering the who’s up/who’s down analysis of the morning, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, are the authors of an upcoming book about the presidential campaign that is a sequel to their hugely successful “Game Change,” which chronicled the dysfunction inside the 2008 presidential campaign. HBO made it into a movie.

Politico recently boasted that a post it published last month on turmoil in the Romney campaign was one of the most-read stories in the publication’s history, drawing nearly 3 million page views.

The main subject of that article, Stuart Stevens, a senior Romney adviser, often complains that the disparity between what the media cares about and what voters care about has never been greater. On Wednesday night, Mr. Stevens stood in the corner of — appropriately enough — the “spin room,” the gymnasium outside the debate hall at the University of Denver where partisans were pushing their take on the debate for journalists.

Mr. Stevens said that in a debate that focused on heavy, substantive issues like bank regulation, the tax code and poverty, Mr. Romney clearly outperformed. “That’s what’s going to make the difference in this election,” he said.

All the past chatter about Mr. Romney’s foot-in-mouth moments, his inability to connect with voters and his staff dysfunction? That was all gone, for the moment, anyway. Or at least until the next viral video, or stump speech gaffe, or poor debate performance shakes up the race again for the pundit class.

Already there were predictions — from pundits, naturally — that the story line would quickly shift once again in the president’s favor. Speaking on Fox News on Thursday, Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard said, “You’re going to have, I think, a media narrative, for lack of a better term, that wants the president to recover.”